% inter-rater reliability
0.9666667
frequency
% of msgs
Information
20
1
Tangible assistance
0
0
Esteem support
10
0.5
Network support
4
0.2
Emotional support
6
0.3
Humor
1
0.05
For this blog we analyzed Dear Abby’s responses to reader questions and our results were slightly different than Braithwaite’s. The information category appeared most frequently in the messages we analyzed, while emotional support appeared most frequently in Braithwaite’s. These differences might be able to be explained because Braithwaite studied people in online support groups for people with disabilities, while we studied Dear Abby’s responses to readers’ questions, which covered a broad range of categories. Dear Abby also probably tried to be a little bit more objective when answering questions, which would explain why there was more information than emotional support in our data. There was also more esteem support because Dear Abby did a lot of “You’re right to feel this way…” and so on.
In reading a lot of the letters to Dear Abby, we noticed that a lot of people wrote to her expecting her to give nice, supportive replies, which is in line with the Social Distance Theory. A lot of time she did give supportive answers, but when she needed to she was a little harsh with some people, and was sarcastic in one reply (our one instance of humor). A lot of her replies also had links to websites her readers could go on for more information, or phone numbers they could call for help. This differences between our results and Braithwaite’s can also be due to the fact that Dear Abby’s responses, though meant to be helpful and supportive most of the time, were ultimately intended to be published in a newspaper, not an online forum.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2005/03/25/LI2005032502583.html
Anne Luck (red) and Brittanie Thompson (purple)
1 comment:
Hi Anne and Brittanie
I was pretty interested to see what you would get in terms of Tangible and Network Assistance since your responses were all from the same author. I figured that it would be pretty unnecessary to get Network Support, seeing as a lot of people have heard of Dear Abby, and also, I figured that Tangible Assistance is out of the question (since I'm sure this Abby fellow is quite busy with all the concerns of everyone else that writes her (or for all we know, him) in).
Nevertheless, I would think that since all your replies come from the same author that you would get either a high amount or very small amount in each category. This may be true for humor and information, but I was surprised at how mild the numbers were that you got for esteem and emotional support. It makes me think that the responder doesn't have just one way of responding to such calls for support, which I suppose I falsely assumed in the beginning.
Also, I agree with you that a lot of the anonymity in this situation is removed, as well as access, since this is going to be published in the newspaper and the audience is a lot bigger than probably intended by whoever sends their problems in. Also, this will probably decrease access, since people can write to Dear Abby whenever they want to, but their responses will take a while in coming, if ever at all.
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